User avatar
grshaw

Posted Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:29 am

Hi there.

I have just got back into Amiga ownership after a gap of some 25 years.

I first bought an Amiga 500 when I was 16 years old in 1988. Here in the UK they were selling for £400 back then. I saved up many weeks worth of pocket money to be be able to afford that. But the excitement of that day still lives with me.

After a couple of years I upgraded to an A1500 and used my first years Student Loan to buy a hard disk. I think it was a 200 MB GVP disk on a Zorro-II card but my memory is definitely hazy. I loved that A1500. It was an awesome machine. It was networked via a Null Modem cable in my University Halls of Residence. Ethernet was still an expensive option back in 1992. Speed was 19.2Kbps. Not bad.

I learned to program on Amigas. First with C and then C++. As a Professional Computer Programmer I owe them a lot.

I sold my Amiga 1500 when it became obvious that Commodore were unwilling to invest sufficiently to keep pace with PC. Even at the time I was sad to say goodbye.

Now, I have reached a point in my life were I am feeling really Nostalgic about those Amigas in my youth.

I have purchased a really nice Amiga 1200 off eBay and powered it up for first time two days back. It’s in really nice condition with only a small amount of yellowing to the top row of keys.

I plan to get WHDLoad working on this machine. I do have a question. What extra stuff am I going to need to install to get a WHDLoad system working for a good range of games. Looks like I will need a trapdoor accelerator. Should I go for an ACA 1233n or the cheaper ACA 1221ec?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:16 pm

Hi grshaw,

Welcome to AmigaLove and thanks for walking us through those memories. Very cool indeed.
I plan to get WHDLoad working on this machine. I do have a question. What extra stuff am I going to need to install to get a WHDLoad system working for a good range of games. Looks like I will need a trapdoor accelerator. Should I go for an ACA 1233n or the cheaper ACA 1221ec?
For WHDLoad to behave well, you should have at least 8MB RAM.

If you go the ACA route, I personally equipped a 1200 with the ACA 1221 about 2 years ago and it offered pretty much everything in one package. Plenty of Mhz to do what you need to do, and way more RAM that I'd ever possibly need. I haven't looked at the offerings in a while, but when I got mine the card came with everything. You simply purchased unlock codes to get to various speeds (a somewhat controversial approach, but it didn't bother me). At the time there was something called (IIRC) "around the world" which basically unlocked everything. So I had processor that I set to 20-something Mhz, and just gobs of RAM.

My beef with the 1200 is that - for me, and I know not everyone will agree with me, but a lot of the games I wanted to play were from the 80's and they all wanted KS/WB 1.3. But that's a topic for another day.

I've never seen a 1500 in person - I think those were UK specific. But it was basically a 2000. I love the 2000!

Welcome!

User avatar
grshaw

Posted Sun Apr 01, 2018 3:18 am

Thanks for the advice. I was veering more towards the ACA 1233n saving money is always good though.

Yes - the A1500 was a UK ( or possibly Europe ? ) specific Amiga. It was an A2000 but was sold without any Hard Disk but with a second internal floppy drive instead. I believe that the thinking went something along these lines. The UK consumer would be unwilling or unable to pay the retail price of an A2000 upfront. Once the A1500 was purchased then an obvious and relatively cheap upgrade would be to add the Hard Disk. This thinking was exactly correct ( in my case at least :) )

I would also like to say what an awesome site Amiga Love is. I have really enjoyed reading it over the last few weeks. I have particularly enjoyed the retro game reviews; such as Dungeon Master and Eye Of the Beholder 2. I enjoyed playing both immensely back in the day. :) Well Done. Excellent work. :)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Apr 01, 2018 8:48 am

Thank you for the kind words! That makes my day. Cheers!

User avatar
TenLeftFingers

Posted Fri Apr 27, 2018 12:39 pm

Great to hear of another return to Amiga, congrats to you! Do you ever think about coding on Amiga again or when you get off work do you prefer to do something different?

There are some great applications currently available for Amiga, such as AmigaCloudHandlers which provide clients for Dropbox and Google Drive on Amiga (I'm running it on my A1200). There's never been a better time to own an Amiga.

User avatar
grshaw

Posted Sat Apr 28, 2018 5:57 am

Thanks for the warm welcome.

Yes - I have been considering getting back into coding on the Amiga. Still looking for a project that interests me though.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sat Apr 28, 2018 1:33 pm

Well in case you know how to use MUI you could bugfix, maintain and / or add a feature or two to RO.
Or provide a MUI-alternative for some prefs that are currently missing.

Just random examples, of course ;) .

User avatar
A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Fri May 18, 2018 2:24 pm

@ grshaw

welcome back! so much new hardware/ software for our miggies and NG miggies it's like 1988 again <3





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